Re: OT: CXS chart and machine-readable Unicode->CXS mappings

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 02:04:37PM -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]
> To be fair, Netscape was in a big hurry to release 6 because they still
> thought they had a shot at regaining their once-dominant position in
> the market.  But it was too late; the long hiatus between 4.7 and 7,
> engendered by the Mozilla project's decision to completely rewrite the
> browser from scratch, had given IE all the extra boost it needed.
Even when Netscape released 4.7, IE was already clearly gaining the upper
hand, slowly, but surely. To the detriment of the WWW, IMNSHO. I stuck
with NS 3 at the time, but it was becoming very clear that the Web has
moved on, and it was no longer viable.

[snip]
> Not that it needed one, probably; simply being the browser that comes
> with the OS was probably enough to guarnatee its eventual dominance.
> But despite very high-quality browser products from other companies like
> Opera, Netscape was the only one that ever had a real shot at competing
> with IE.  A shot it lost by not releasing anything for too long.
In my experience, Opera beats Netscape 6 & 7 hands down. Although the
re-engineered Mozilla is an amazingly versatile platform, I've yet to see
anything that beats Opera in terms of size/usability ratio. And speed. I
am highly annoyed by the need to install 100MB (or however big Mozilla is
nowadays) tarballs only to find out it takes 2 MINUTES to render a simple
webpage on my old PII 333MHz. Especially when the same job is done better,
faster, and with less resources by a browser like Opera.

> Technically, the result of the rewrite decision is a far superior browser;
> I use Firefox as my daily browser of choice and absolutely love it.
> There's little doubt it's a better browser than IE; but
> market-share-wise, I don't think that will make much difference.
Opera is gaining quite a lot of ground in the embedded market in EU. The
embedded market could dominate the end-user market in the future, so this
is no small feat IMHO. Plus, people are beginning to clue-in to the
gratuitous, unnecessary incompatibilities that MS likes to ship with IE.
Hopefully the W3C will be able to push XHTML through, so that we can
finally have a sane interchange format on the web: a first step towards
levelling the playground.

[snip]
> > and  (b) incredibly broken about Unicode
>
> Indeed.  From the Unicode point of view, Netscape 4 belongs to a
> prehistoric era, when one could almost safely assume that web pages were
> Latin-1.
Ugh. Don't remind me. :-)


T

--
"Uhh, I'm still not here." -- KD, while "away" on ICQ.

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